My Holy War: Dispatches From the Home Front by Jonathan Raban (Picador, £9.99)

We need sane voices in these times, and they don't come much saner, or indeed much more alert and stylish, than Jonathan Raban's. Now living in Seattle, a liberal enclave surrounded by howling illiberal voices, he has found much to alarm him since George Bush declared his war on terror. He is not alone: "on weekend protest marches against the Bush White House, prosperous bourgeois families, more usually seen tramping around the downtown art galleries on the first Thursday evening of each month, hugely outnumber the bearded peaceniks of the radical fringe." We presume this is a Good Thing.

This collection of pieces - one or two of which have appeared in these pages - is more than just a ragbag of occasional journalism (not that I have anything against ragbags). It works as a unified entity, a diary of anxiety and alarm caused by the current "war on terrorism"; a declaration of war, as he puts it, "like declaring war on tanks, or bows and arrows". But it is also a useful primer, for those who need to be primed, on the relevant background details. Such as, for instance, the locus classicus of militant Islam's rejection of the west, Sayyad Qutb's Milestones. (It was this knowledge that managed to get David Cameron to quote him in a speech last year, when he was shadow foreign secretary; don't be alarmed. It's not Raban's fault, and does at least show that Cameron has done some worthwhile reading.)

He quotes from Qutb, who even in the 1950s, even in Greeley, Colorado, that depraved fleshpot of the decadent west, found himself wrinkling his nose in disgust: "The believer from his height looks down at the people drowning in dirt and mud. He may be the only one; yet he is not dejected or grieved, nor does his heart desire that he take off his neat and immaculate garments and join the crowd."

"This," says Raban, "is exactly the posture that hardline Islamists who live in the west today are advised to adopt," and it would be well for us to remember this, or be reminded of it. (By "we" I mean those of us who are not hardline Islamists and/or would prefer not to live under a theocracy or be murdered by those who would. As someone who has written a whole book about Arabia, Raban can be expected to know whereof he speaks.) From where he sits, the thought of a second Bush term "inspires, among urban liberals, something close to the fear of death itself - the death of America as a civilised and civilising presence in the world".

There are one or two pieces that don't quite fit in. These, however, are worth reading not only for their own sake but also because they enlarge the context he writes about and within: one is an account of a road trip taken with his young daughter to Baja California (cue thoughtful reflections on climate change and economic migrancy), another a review of William Langeweische's The Outlaw Sea, picked a few months ago by this very column (cue morbid fantasies about a bomb-laden cargo vessel piling into Seattle harbour and blowing everything up).

But, overall, this is a picture of a country whose leaders are in the grip of a terrifying, nightmarish mixture of profound ignorance and deranged self-belief. Raban makes his points calmly, and with no trace of English condescension, however hair-raising the instances he cites. Even when he writes about his own atheism - as compared with the religious convictions of Bush and the Islamists - he does so with a self-deprecating shrug, as if it were merely the continuation of the adolescent posture adopted to annoy his father, a Church of England clergyman.

But Raban also notices another strand of American belief, one that, in alliance with, and rejection of, certain other kinds of belief, could come to destroy us all. He recalls Don Quixote's song from Man of La Mancha: "To dream the impossible dream, To fight the unbeatable foe," and so on. As he glosses it: "Only an entrenched belief in one's own exceptionalism and a wonder-working Providence could justify such otherwise self-evidently futile activities." It is rather chilling to have it spelled out for one like that. But they really do like that song.